Not long ago I spoke at the memorial service for my friend Herbert Crimes. An ardent Afrocentrist, he went by the name of Sibanye, which means “together as one” in Swahili. The many colors visible among the large audience at his secular service—held in a rented hall in the Adam Clayton Powell state office building in Harlem where Sibanye used to preside over a monthly humanist community group meeting—testified to the pluralism of his personal life in an America still segregated by race.
Still, the unusual breadth and depth of this man’s pluralism was enough to make some of the assembled uncomfortable. While the friends and associates who spoke included Christian, Jew, Muslim, and secularist, Sibanye’s atheism was politely avoided by most of us. While I am opposed on principle to appropriating the life of a deceased person for one’s own ideological cause, I felt called to point out in my remarks that—according to Sibanye’s own beliefs—he had not gone on to “a better place” in the next world. The person I knew and admired, having had no hope for a life hereafter, devoted most of this life’s energies to making this world that better place.
Although we sometimes speak of the dead living on through their legacies, this secular promise of immortality only goes so far. Of course it is true that our lives are worth living in part because we participate in projects—like building a bridge or raising a child—that will outlast our lifespans. Yet this presupposes that our lifespans are not co-terminal with those projects, or that their survival is not the same thing as our survival. Woody Allen had it right: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” There’s the rub.
Believers in the beyond often ask unbelievers how they can accept the prospect that death is the end. Some even confess they are motivated to believe by their wish to vanquish the grave. It is true that the atheist has nowhere to go in death but to the “mankind making/Bird beast and flower/Fathering and all humbling darkness,” as Dylan Thomas puts it in his astonishing poem to end all eulogies, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, Of a Child in London.”
This non-destination makes every death an infinitely greater loss, and makes unmitigated grief the only appropriate response. In this, only the secular way of death fully honors the dead, where “better place” platitudes betray him. Thomas’ paradoxically titled “Refusal to Mourn” is in fact the refusal to mitigate grief, to paper over the universe’s forever-loss of singular person in guaze-promises of eternity: “I shall not murder/The mankind of her going with a grave truth.”
Yes, dying may be harder for the atheist. But what I cannot understand, and reject totally, is the further claim that the life stopped short of eternity is thereby robbed of sense or worth: If it all comes to an end, what’s it all for? The first thing to observe about this existential anxiety is that we can’t resolve it just by postulating an eternal afterlife. Consider the sorts of good things that might possibly await us in paradise: knowing and loving other persons (including God), being known and loved, apprehending truth, experiencing beauty (and, in the afterlife of some, fine food, drink, and other sensual delights). These goods worth wanting in the next world are goods that we already have in this one—things like love, knowledge, beauty, and pleasure (even praising an Almighty!). If a life there is worth having, then a life here is worth having. Every treasure laid up in heaven has been stolen from Earth, and the joys of paradise are parasitic on the joys of the world.
Yes, having more joy is better than having less, all else being equal. And that is why death is a loss. It takes away the possibility of participating in any goods whatever. But that is not the same as showing them to have never been goods at all. When our participation in a good is cut short, we may wish it could go on, but the wishing is a sign that it was worth pursuing after all. The recognition that we missed out on some of its value is evidence that the value did not lose all of its sense.
Heaven can’t help our existential anxiety because the anxiety is not amenable to a quantitative solution. We can’t show that love or wisdom is worth having just by having more of them. “What does it all add up to?” is not answered by “n+1.” You can bet your bottom dollar that if there is a heaven, and if there are any thinking persons in it, then at least one of them is at this very instant thinking, “Okay then, what’s all this for?” So long as we retain our personhood in the next world, such questions may be inescapable. And insofar as we do not retain our personhood, we literally have nothing to look forward to.
Sibanye and I spent many hours in conversation about secularism, religion, and the black community. He was a tireless activist on issues of public education, racial justice, and black male identity, and he believed that Enlightenment values of pluralism, toleration, critical reason, and secular government were essential to progress. Almost every one of these conversations ended with Sibanye looking forward to some future activities, some next step, and parting with the words, “We’ll just take it from there.” And so I left the audience at Adam Clayton Powell with those words, for everyone still engaged in the endeavors that animated his life. Sibanye, we’ll just take it from there.
Tags: afterlife, atheism, death, dylan thomas, heaven, secular humanists, secularism, woody allen
Do people think believing in life after death actually brings life after death? Do they think not believing in life after death brings a different result when someone dies? I think whenever a religion makes promises about life after death that eventually leads to problems. When they make threats about judgment day, the result can be even worse. I believe we should not let these beliefs distract us from what we can accomplish during that period of our life when we can accomplish things. That is what is important.
Finally something we can agree on. I want to know how to live, I will deal with death when I get there.
Just be careful because religion likes to make promises that they will never be held accountable for.
If an individual self dies, if the ego goes back into the stream of creation, does that mean there is no meaning for the self beyond death? Our mistake is in seeing the individual as separate from the great story of evolution and creation, in thinking that each human has a separate soul, or a separate identity (that can be saved!), separate from that incredible 13.7 billion year process, that goes on despite our mistake, not because of it. Something unique happened with the human, so it goes, and suddenly souls appeared to be breathed into each one. Then Western thought turned that individual human-with-a-soul into the purpose of creation, all of this created for me.
Our real meaning does not come from there. Our meaning comes from being in the process of creation, a participant in it. With what meaning and to what end we cannot know. Religions try to answer those questions and an additional mistake is to take any of these answers literally. Rather, they express the longing for meaning that is part of the journey.
We are not separate from the stream. It created us, we emerge from it, we die back into it. This is beautiful. In this sense, nothing is lost even when the ego dissipates. What we give to that stream is what matters, and sometimes what we humans put into it is pretty terrible.
Paul says we must grow lesser so that Christ can grow greater. We relinquish the ego, the self, so that whatever is at work in creation can continue to unfold. Each of us has our part in that narrative. On the other hand, clinging to the ego has brought much grief.
Death is loss, and nothing is lost. That is the mystery of life and death and life and death and life and death.
margaret
www.ecologicalhope.org
That sounds like DNA strands competing for a pool of limited resources.
Imagine Margaret that the "stream" you are talking about is "enfolded" into a higher dimensional space, so much so, that there are connections to realms outside of this Universe. Our evolved brains are highly tuned to quantum order and realities; consciousness does not exist within the brain but outside of it. The stream of life, evolution, etc., is utlized by the creator as vessels to train us through the life process. Before our existences as humans we lived as spirit children with God. This does not subsume an end to learning, but a beginning. I would quibble with your notion that we are created here. Our human bodies are no more than radio receivers of a sort from another realm. We do not have a Spinozian God, nor a pantheistic one that we are absorbed into. He is the Heavenly father, and is able to use his creation to support our training, our mission while we are here. Theology and physics are on a slow convergence towards each other. The best laid "explanation of everything" in physics will only serve as the planking for the floor of our conscious minds, and there interaction with God. The irony is that knowing reality through Science still only puts you at the base board below the Spritual realm, which is built upon it. Our mission here is simple: to learn how to love. Our little ventures into this and that cause is LOST is it directly about people.
Ego is stripped at death. Ego is necessary to traverse this reality. Christ's warning is to not fall in love with the tool itself.
If the Bible is correct then human beings have something the other animals don't, a supernatural spirit. Human beings are dual-natured; immortal spirit, mortal soul/body. I's the immortal part of us that rises to God upon death of the body. If we didn't have it, we would be no better off than the other animals!
According to Plato this world is not the true reality, but an imperfect copy - a hologram. If God was here it would be perfect as He is but it's not perfect and God strangely removed from it. There's much more than what meets the eye.
I think Mr. Dacey is incorrect in stating that the secularist's assessment of "non-destination" at the point of death "makes unmitigated grief the only appropriate response" to death. There can be joy along with the grief (thus, the grief is mitigated). In particular, I think of the Richard Dawkins' quote: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
But the idea that potential but unrealised combinations of DNA are in some way "people" sounds suspiciously like a religious idea to me.
Professor Dawkins must have had an off day there.
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